House prices and proximity to kindergarten – costs of distance and external effects?

ABSTRACT Parents accompany children to day-care, implying costs of time and money. Distance to kindergarten may therefore be an important locational attribute, which is likely to be discounted into house prices. We account for this through a theoretical model of house price formation, incorporating not only monetary and time costs associated with accompanying children to a kindergarten, but also possibly negative external effects of kindergartens on their immediate vicinity. Our theoretical model predicts that house prices increase as distance to kindergarten decreases, reach a peak, and then decline as one come very close to a kindergarten. We use a large sample of house transactions from a Norwegian town to explore the relationship between house prices and the distance to kindergarten. The empirical results support the prediction that house prices decline as distance to kindergarten increases, but we find no significant drop in house prices in the immediate vicinity of kindergartens. The results may be of interest to several actors in real-estate markets, perhaps particularly to urban planners and real-estate developers when considering the location of kindergartens.